Dr Auke Willems

LSE Fellow in EU Law

European Institute

About me

Auke is LSE Fellow in EU Law at the European Institute since September 2017. Prior to joining LSE, he completed his PhD in EU criminal law jointly at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Université libre de Bruxelles. Auke also completed an LLM in International Law at the University of Edinburgh, an LLM by research on the topic of EU fundamental rights at the University of Glasgow, and a degree in Law (LLB) at the University of Amsterdam.

He has been a teaching and research assistant at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a researcher at the Institute for European Studies. He is moreover an editorial assistant with the New Journal of European Criminal Law. Auke has been a visiting researcher at the European University Institute (2016), Columbia University Law School (2014-2015), and Babeș-Bolyai University (2013).

Research interests

Auke’s main research interests center around EU law, EU criminal law, human rights law, counter-terrorism law and international criminal law. He has published in peer-reviewed journals on these topics, and has presented various papers at international conferences.

Auke’s PhD research focussed on the principle of mutual trust within EU mutual recognition based criminal justice cooperation. His thesis examined what mutual trust is in the EU criminal justice context, and how mutual trust between EU Member States can be fostered. An important aspect of the thesis has been a comparative EU-USA study, to analyse how trust functions within a federal entity, as well as a multi-disciplinary study of the concept of trust, analysing the core functions of trust as developed in the social sciences.